BBC director general Tim Davie gave the speech at a Royal Television Society event held in central London this week.
“Internet-only distribution is an opportunity to connect more deeply with our audiences and to provide them with better services and choice than broadcast allows,” Davie said.
He painted a picture of an “online-only” future for the BBC, in which there is “still a lot of live linear viewing but it is all being delivered online”.
He suggested a “move to an internet future with greater urgency” is required, and that, “over time this will mean fewer linear broadcast services and a more tailored, joined-up online offer.”
This represents something of an acceleration of the BBC’s “digital-first” plans, which saw the announcement in May 2022 that BBC Four and CBBC are to go online-only.
Those channels still broadcast in 2022, however, and are not expected to go fully online before 2025.
Why is the BBC in decline?
“We are in a period of real jeopardy,” says Davie. “A life-threatening challenge to our local media, and the cultural and the social benefit they provide.”
The wider context of this assertion is that younger audiences now watch less linear TV than previous generations, a predictable effect of the rise of streaming services and video-heavy social networks like TikTok. Added to this is the threat that the Government has suggested the licence fee may be scrapped in 2028.
This is far from certain, of course. That assertion was made by former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, who resigned in the wake of Liz Truss’s appointment as prime minister.
“In the BBC, we are privileged to have the Licence Fee until ’27/’28 but, if you take the period 2010 to 2028, we forecast that core funding for the BBC has been cut by a whopping 30 per cent,” says Davie.
Large parts of his speech become moot if Labour win a 2024 general election and take a starkly different approach to BBC funding, compared to the current Tory Government.
The truly “online-only” BBC becomes something of a threat, a vision of what could happen if the licence fee is fully abolished and the BBC has to generate its own funding entirely.
You only have to look to FM radio to see how unlikely a truly online-only BBC is, with public service remit in tow, any time soon. The Government confirmed plans to carry on transmitting FM radio until 2030 in 2021, in order to ensure the widest possible access to public-service broadcasting, mere months before then culture secretary Nadine Dorries suggested “government ownership is holding Channel 4 back from competing against streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon”.
